Over at pastorhacks, Bob reposts something he wrote about prayer a while ago.  His point is that prayer requests are overwhelming to some people in ministry.  I can imagine that the larger a church gets, the volume of prayer requests also grows.  I found myself thinking, “well, why don’t they set up a prayer team and have them take all these prayer requests?”

Then I thought, “what if the prayer team gets overwhelmed?”

Then I thought, “maybe a rotational system that distributes the requests by round-robin.”

Then I thought, but what about Matthew 18:19?  Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. Doesn’t that mean that we are shortchanging people’s prayer requests by only having one person pray for them?”

Then I realized, again, just like I realized last night on the phone with a lady from church who was pouring some of her heart out to me about her struggles as a Christian woman unequally yoked, that I try to fix things too much.  Here I am trying to solve the problem of prayer requests, just like last night my mind went into overdrive even as she spoke, trying to figure out how to reach out to her husband, who I’ve never even met.

Sometimes we need to trust God.  Praying for each other is what we should do, with those we are in relationship with.  I don’t know that God wants us alerting everyone we’ve ever had contact information for about our prayer needs.  He will act when two agree, and he doesn’t “hurry up” if we get two thousand prayer partners.

But there are other reasons to pray too.  I think prayer builds up our own hearts.  I think that it keeps us sensitive to things that do need God.  I think about the prayer book that was distributed to me at the GBIM (Grace Brethren International Missions) lunch we had in Tampa at the conference.  I determined yesterday to begin to pray through it, like the book is designed (it even has little checkboxes on each page so you can mark down who you’ve prayed for).  I don’t really know anyone in this book, but I believe that God will listen to my petition.  But more, he will work in my own heart to give me confidence when others pray for me.  Even more, he will grow my heart for reaching the world for Jesus.  It conforms me to Jesus’ heart to see every nation come to him in gratitude and love for his supreme sacrifice on Calvary.

And that’s a good thing.